Interview - Andy Griffiths : The Very Bad Book

Author of The Very Bad Book and The Day My Bum Went Psycho

By Michael Tancredi and Sean Lynch

Purchase The Very Bad Book by Andy Griffith HERE!

Andy Griffiths is without doubt Australia's most popular children's writer and has, over the past 15 years, had his books on the New York Times bestsellers list, won over 40 children's choice awards, been adapted as a television cartoon series and sold over four million copies worldwide.

While best known for his work on the much-loved Just! series and The Day My Bum Went Psycho, it's his latest collaboration with illustrator Terry Denton that is shooting Andy Griffiths into a whole new league.

Web Wombat caught up with the literary legend while on a four week tour across the country ahead of the release of The Very Bad Book - a new collection of very bad poems, stories, songs, cartoons, comic strips, jokes, riddles and whatever other nonsense they figured they could get away with.

You're a few weeks into your speaking tour - do you ever get sick of having to talk to people?

We've evolved a style of touring where we can talk to between 600 and 800 kids at the one event. Which I can never get sick of - it's always fun to take 800 excited children on a wild ride through the nonsense that I write [Laughs].

Is it difficult controlling the attention of that many rowdy kids?

No, no, I love it. If I was a surfer, it'd be like surfing the big wave. It's actually easier to talk to a big group because they kind of get a momentum - one laughs and they all laugh!

I've also been testing out the material from the books that are coming up [for release] next year. I can read it out to them, and it's a very effective way of calibrating where the material is and whether it needs tightening... or needs to be replaced completely [Laughs].

Have you ever had a dead silence with a crowd of kids? Are they the harshest critics?

Not harsh - just honest. If it's not working, it's pretty obvious [Laughs].

I asked the person in charge of the Children's Book section at my local Book Store as to why she thought your books are so popular, she described you as : "Someone who has never grown up".

[Laughs] I think I've kept a direct line to the ten year old inside of me. It doesn't mean that the rest of my life I go around acting like a ten year old - in fact, I think that's a misunderstanding of what a grown up is.

A well developed adult knows what the appropriate behaviour is in the appropriate situation - and to think that to be an adult is to "always be serious" and "always have weighty issues on your mind" and "be incredibly busy" and have no time for fun, I think that's a complete perversion of the idea of what it is to actually grow up.

You can be far more effective - and Edward De Bono, the lateral thinking expert, would back me up on this I'm sure [Laughs] - if you bring a sense of levity and lightness and willingness to step outside of the ordinary way of viewing things, you solve problems more effectively and you solve problems more effectively.

So, in effect, you put on your "Childrens Humour Hat" in De Bono language to write your stories...

That's very good use of De Bono language [Laughs]. I put that hat on and I step out of the way as an adult and go "Ok, here's the pen- you go for it", and I withhold my judgment. If the 10 year old  wants to write The Day My Bum Went Psycho, I'll roll my eyes and groan along with all the other adults and go "Oh, really?!".

So I just step out of the way and come back later when it's all done. The editing process then becomes crucial where I'll look at it from the point of view of an adult, from the point of view of a teacher reading to the classroom and from the point of view of a parent reading it to a child.

How much of a difference does that editing make?

For instance, The Day My Bum Went Psycho, after doing some readings for it I realised that if you said the word "Fart" or "Poo" - it wasn't anywhere near as funny as when you implied it. So my wife [and Editor] went through and took out every obvious word and we found a million different ways of describing poo without actually saying poo.

What you get, by doing that, is a more creative book - you let the reader do more of the work.

The Very Bad Book is very different in style to your previous novels - in that it's not a novel at all. What inspired the change?

The Bad Books grew out of the Just! series, which have illustrations all around and flick pictures in the corners. The reason we did that, originally, was because I'd seen kids picking out the books in the library (when I used to be an English teacher) and they would often flick the books to see how big the print was.

So I said to Terry Denton "Just put flick pictures on the corners just so they start playing with the book and get some fun out of it before they've even read it". So he went to town drawing pictures in the margins and really created what is a book within a book.

But after four of those, I was so impressed with what he was doing - I just said "We should do a book where this marginal stuff becomes the main feature". There was a certain freedom to it, because we didn't have to tell a story, you could just run tiny little ideas and get the fun out of it.

Amidst the sometimes crass and silly cartoons and jokes in The Very Bad Book there seems to be subliminal messages  (eg: if you do naughty things - there will be consequences) - is that something you purposely tried to do - teach without being "preachy"?

That's an excellent reading. A lot of people miss the point the first time around, they see the kids and characters doing crazy things and they say "You're terrible, you're encouraging them to do these things". But, if you read these stories properly, very few people actually profit from their evil-doings.

I probably adopted that very early on in Just Tricking, where I thought that my character has permission to play any joke no matter how horrendous - but in the end, it has to backfire on him. Otherwise, it won't be a satisfying story - you'll just have a nasty character whose taking advantage of people the whole time.

So it's just an inbuilt sense of what makes a good story : bad people should get some payback in the end.

That said - it's not the point of the story. The aim is to shock them, make them laugh. My first responsibility is to engage their imagination, to get them loving the book - and by implication - inspire them to pick up another book afterwards.

I'm sure there are other messages to take from the stories - but ultimately the author's responsibility, when you're writing for kids, is to give them a great time, ensure they come back for more and just need to trust that they will take what they need from reading - that their imagination may grow that little bit more, so they can apply it to other areas of their life.

The Very Bad Book is out now through Pan Macmillan